hckrnws
I jumped into the book after hearing all the buzz as it seemed like the big scifi hit of 2025. Killer premise and for the most part the fast pacing works... for the first third or so. But it you can feel the short story anthology vibe as it goes on and becomes practically a disconnected series of vignettes, and even the central idea itself loses cohesion. The Big Bad Thing has so many manifestations that it feels like monster of the week rather than a true full book that holds onto a core sharply executed identity. Less a grand thesis than a series of isolated short form thrills.
So the long and short of it is, definitely worth it for the first third and dimishing returns after that.
As for the short film, I think it's great for what it is, gets better and better as it goes and is worth the short watch. Fascinating seeing the visual depictions of the stuff the book talks about both foreground and background.
My experience with the book became a bit meta. I greatly enjoyed the first half or so of it. Though it did start to feel a little repetitive after a while. But I couldn't get past the first half because all the black line "redactions" started making my Kindle unstable. First time I've seen an ebook's formatting crash the device.
Eventually gave up because of the constant slowdowns and crashes. Which in many ways fit the book. I liked thinking the data within was so dangerous and alien that my Kindle could not handle it. I know this wasn't intentional by the author but still, it was a nice metafictional touch.
I suppose a future horror novelist could replicate this intentionally. A creepy combination of symbols guaranteed to overwhelm a limited memory ereader. Coming at the right point in the story, it could be effective. Though it would also lead to a ton of 1-star reviews.
> the big scifi hit of 2025
I read the book in 2024 (before it was cool!), and have the email order as evidence, but quite fittingly I have almost no memory of what was in it, or how I found out about it.
Bit like the bad guys The Silence from Dr Who: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po8Jc7sLbP8
> 2024 (before it was cool!)
The original draft of the first part "We Need To Talk About Fifty-Five" was posted to scp-wiki in 2015, and the SCP-055 entry dates back to 2008!
What a coincidence. I also read the book and can't recall what it was about. Umm, what were we talking about again?
I actually liked all of it. It's slightly more cohesive than the original writing on the SCP website, which is structured as a series of short thematically linked reports. I get that style won't appeal to everyone though.
Still one of the more original bits of sci fi / horror to be published in a while, so a strong recommendation from me!
The core pitch becomes quite formulaic. It's a fun kind of formulaic, but all the SCPs are made from the same relatively small set of moving parts, painted with different colours and textures for each specific monster.
But as a concept it's still one of the freshest things to appear in SF this century, and it's a wonderful contrast to more standard action hero SF.
Right. I respect it for what it is, and there are elements that are amazing and deeply thought out. But there's an alternate universe where the whole of it is a big cohesive vision statement in the metaphysical/visionary subgenre of Scifi a la Blindsight by Peter Watts or Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. But has that potential but where it lands is closer to monster-of-the-week in book form.
I also didn't think it was quite as good as it was hyped to be, but as someone who has long been into the web-based SCP stuff, I did appreciate how the book is introducing SCP to a wider audience.
I read it based on a reddit search for 'good sci fi books' and that's it. Going in with no hype or expectations and I thought it was great.
PS. HNers, any good sci-fi book recommendations?
I feel like I have to mention "The Sky So Big and Black" by John Barnes. IMO, rather underrated. Hadn't really read any good Mars-based science fiction before.
A write up review of books I've read and there are a couple scifi books (and a bunch of other recommendations) here: https://alexpotato.com/books/
Nicely done, thanks!
“Service Model” is a recent one and I had an absolute blast with it. If you don’t have much of a humanities background, you’d benefit from skimming the Wikipedia article. There’s a lot of references to old novels you might miss if you don’t have the context.
You might be interested in this prequel to "Service Model": "Human Resources" [1]
[1] https://reactormag.com/human-resources-adrian-tchaikovsky/
He needs to do more in this universe and maybe connect it to one of his others. He really specializes in all the variants of collapse and I love every page of it.
Just read Lexicon by Max Barry (2013) - great sci-fi thriller that actually has a strong anti-memetic component. I wonder if it was an influence on qntm's book.
Lexicon was very good. I'd also recommend Bad Monkeys, by Matt Ruff, for a vaguely similar feel (although the subject matter is completely different.)
I loved Jennifer Government (Max Barry) wayyyy back.
I'm a pretty big fan of Roadside Picnic!
The Diamond Age is feeling more and more prescient to me as time goes on
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge
Player Piano by Vonnegut
Dune
I just came across Hardwired from 1986, it's a cyberpunk dystopian future with lots of action. I loved it, some of it is very prescient, but with lots of 80s influence to an imagined future.
Interesting chain of descent: Walter Jon Williams wrote Hardwired, and R Talsorian Games based their tabletop RPG, Cyberpunk 2020, on it. That's the source material used for the computer RPG, Cyberpunk 2073.
Meanwhile, WJW followed up with Voice of the Whirlwind, which seems to be set about a century later, and drops enough references in Aristoi to place it as the third book in the same universe, quite possibly a thousand years later.
I recommend all three (and almost everything that WJW has written).
"The Big Bad Thing has so many manifestations that it feels like monster of the week rather than a true full book that holds onto a core sharply executed identity."
This is one of the structural weaknesses in the entire SCP... motif, for lack of a better word. When a core part of the premise is "you can't understand it, not even in principle, if you think you understand it you're wrong", the premise does some fairly fundamental damage to what most people would consider the basic structure of a story. Generally we think that at least in hindsight, a story should "make sense", but SCPs by their nature have to be somewhat random and lack predictability or they aren't SCPs. You can try to wrap a more conventional story around that particular motif, but you've always got this fundamental structural weakness sitting right smack in the middle of it, and you can't remove it without leaving the sub-genre. The SCP structure fundamentally starts with a negation of this aspect of stories.
It is fun seeing what some people do with this limitation, and there are after all compensating benefits or nobody would write in the universe. But it is something that is going to be there in any story set in an SCP or SCP-like universe.
I think it was Larry Niven that observed that most stories are judged by something like character, plot, theme, etc., and that one of the distinguishing characteristics of science fiction is that you have to add the background to the list of things to look at. But only a vanishingly small set of works ever managed to have character, plot, theme, and the other characteristics firing on all cylinders as it was; asking for a work to have all that and also be 5 out of 5 on the new setting it establishes as well is way too much to ask of a work. With this sort of story, as a reader you are putting all your chips on the setting. Going in to this sort of work you should expect the conventional measures of a story to at least take a hit, and in many cases a fairly large one. And of course, if that's not what you want, then you're not going to enjoy it and I have no problem with that. This is less a "defense" than an explanation, that if you didn't particularly enjoy this, I'd suggest staying away from the entire subgenre because the entire SCP subgenre is structurally prone to these issues from the very foundation on up.
(To give another example, Greg Egan has a number of works in which he fiddles with the laws of physics, to do things like have two time dimensions and two spatial dimensions, then works out how that actually affects physics using math rather than intuition and write stories in the resulting universes. This is such an investment into the setting that I don't find it all that surprising that I don't find the characters all that compelling per se. There just isn't the room. But you can't get that setting anywhere else.)
I think the SCP is great as a basically perfect infrastructure for playing in this space that makes room for community participation. But absorbing them as a whole into a story is tough. I think you put the basic bargain reasonably well int he following:
>With this sort of story, as a reader you are putting all your chips on the setting. Going in to this sort of work you should expect the conventional measures of a story to at least take a hit, and in many cases a fairly large one. And of course, if that's not what you want, then you're not going to enjoy it and I have no problem with that.
Where I would challenge that as it relates to TINAMD is I am not sure it fully succeeds even against this basic bargain. By contrast I would note Annihilation which is exactly as you describe, light on characters and plot and entirely about setting, and I think it sticks the landing on those terms in ways this book could have. But still, love its premise, love the traction its getting and I think the healthier way to engage with it is to cheer it on for its successes, which are significant.
I agree sci-fi is an outlier on this, but I also think all stories compete on setting to some extent. Fantasy most obviously (Tolkien, JK Rowling). But also for example the Jazz Age setting of The Great Gatsby contributed a lot to the novel's popularity and was a bit fictionalized, hard boiled detective writers like Hammett or Chandler wrote about a crime-filled world that was fictionalized for appeal, historical romances about lords and ladies are super fictionalized and so on. Writers try to put appeal into everything, that's why they're writers.
Larry Niven isn't referring to merely an "unusual" setting in his quote (which I've never managed to find referenced online, unfortunately), but to the way in science fiction you are creating the setting from scratch. Gatsby is set in the Jazz Age, and you can pick up some aspects of it from that, but it is still in the stock set of settings the author expected you to have some ideas about, so it doesn't explain how cars work or how doors open. And by that, I don't mean the sort of "explain" at an engineering level, but things like "how combadges work" in Star Trek, i.e., when they work, when they don't, what can be sent on them, what failures they are prone to, etc. Even something as fantastic as Tolkien is still generally set in a particular milieu and he is adding very skillful and numerous brush strokes to a genre that existed already.
You've read many stories set in all the settings you mentioned. You have never read a story in which the fundamental shape of space-time is two time dimensions and two space dimensions before, unless you have also read Dichronauts. This is the supplementary material to the novel, which is mostly not in the novel and is not the story itself, just the background: https://gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/01/World.html You don't need that provided for something set in the Jazz Age, or a fantasy story explicitly based on myths that had been floating around for centuries, or a historical fantasy. Someone could write some equivalent, but you don't need it; it's already loaded into your head. That's the point.
> This is such an investment into the setting that I don't find it all that surprising that I don't find the characters all that compelling per se.
His characters do tend to be a little flat, but I think I almost always found them compelling. His books tend to be a physics or mathematics primer, wrapped in a pretty thin plot, but as soon as you poke at that plot-wrapper, most of the time some pretty good social commentary comes steaming out.
What is SCP
It's an open collaborative fictional universe.
My experience of the book was similar: the first third was great. Great idea, brilliantly executed. Definitely worth it for the first third alone.
In a way, maybe it going off-piste is coherent with the idea of the first third. I'm sure this was not the author's intent, but fun from an ironic perspective.
It certainly invites that level of meta-commentary on its own structure, though I agree it's inadvertent. And I know at some point someone is going invoke that point in full sincerity as if its an answer, and whatever that is, the satisfied meta-commentary that makes too much of irony as if its a sincere insight, I feel like is just looming as a possible and frustratingly shallow justification of the book. There's an interesting question there of the scales of abstraction at which anti-memes could function, and that's fascinating but as you noted in this instance not necessarily intentional.
It makes me think of the movie Doubt, where I remember being sincerely confused as to the central accusation at the center of the movie, and was told that not being sure was the point and by expecting an answer I was missing the point since the whole movie is about "doubt". I felt this explanation was, frankly, just stupid. Just because you're going meta doesn't mean any point coherently registered in the form of meta-analysis is insightful. But anyway, I'm off the rails a bit now going after imaginary adversaries, but agree with everything you've said.
I wonder did you read the re-release or the original release. I believe it was recently re-released with a bit of an editing pass, but I haven't read that version myself. I just recently reread Fine Structure and it definitely had a strong sense of being written sequentially, one chapter after another, and (very) lightly edited after the fact. I'd recommend Valuable Humans in Transit for a short story collection by the same author which works a bit better for me. Moved on to Exhalation by Ted Chiang which is also a very good short story collection. And just in general, I want to recommend Clarkesworld: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com
I've read both, and the "editing pass" was minimal. Names changed and some scenes reworked a tiny bit, but it's the same thing. If you've read the original, I'd say don't bother with the new one.
Thanks, that’s the answer I was looking for!
It definitely needed an editor to help them polish it up. It's funny though, I read it a year or two ago while I was in the middle of I Am A Strange Loop by Hofstadter and I'm positive the author of TiNAD had just read IAASL when they wrote it...People essentially being memes explained through loss of a partner, Prokofiev making a conspicuous appearance, and strange loopiness in general. It was weird, like the author and I had just read the same book.
I felt similar about the book. The premise was thrilling, but as it went on it seemed to succumb to typical genre tropes, ending didn't deliver.
I remember after reading the first few chapters thinking this may be one of the coolest books I've ever read. It sort of meanders and fizzles out. It starts so strong it seems impossible to finish as strong. I would still recommend the book. It's got some very cool and unique ideas and it's a fun story.
True, the first third had some mystery to it. The rest was kind of mediocre as far as sci-fi goes.
Very nice. This is up there with my favorite DUST short film, "Final Offer". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv8kOzRZK8g
That's a great find. My personal favourite so far from Dust is "Laboratory Conditions": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N25e4Ss34Q
It's been a long time since a book has gripped my attention like the one this short film is based on. It has many interesting ideas and a plot with some truly unexpected twists.
The latest version of the book distances itself from the source material (a good decision imo): The SCP Foundation. It's an extremely interesting project, with some parallels to FOSS. I wonder if there are other joint literary projects of similar scale.
Oh wow, They filmed it! Twice even!
hn discussion about the written versions
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41224225
A different version by different director/actors:
What do you mean? There is no antimemetics film.
I bet they filmed it way more than twice.
I bet everyone's seen it way more than twice.
I never thought much of Adrian Gage as a director anyway
twice... in the last 15 minutes.
Did they forget it was already filmed once?
Reminds me of "Total Rickall"(Rick and Morty: Season 2, Episode 4) which itself is probably a retelling of a retelling of a retelling of a retelling.
Lots of people familiar with the material here, but as somone with zero context, I watched the film and I don't get it.
Is it something where you need to know the backstory to get the importance? The premise just seems quite thin: (Spoiler alert) the guy behind the desk had his mind erased and the guy with the gun is an impostor.
Is there more to it than that?
I think the story is written in a much better way than this video presents it: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/we-need-to-talk-about-fifty-fiv...
I know it's not polite to armchair-critique a thing I could never have created myself, but I don't think this is a particularly good adaptation of this story. One change, I think, completely robs it of some of its impact, and I would have handled something else differently as well - but oh well.
> One change, I think, completely robs it of some of its impact
Which one?
One thing I didn't like from this adaptation is that the thought-devouring idea doesn't live inside Wheeler's mind, like in the story. They made it into a CGI blob. But I suppose the story is confusing enough, so making it invisible would have been too much.
You're missing a bit, like there is an entire top secert division of people that fight against mind erasing aliens, and there are a large variety of mind erasing aliens.
It's set in the "SCP" universe. It's a collection of short stories ( https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/ ), collaboratively written.
Most of them are (as expected) crap. Some of them are really scary, and some are hilarious: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-4703
Comment was deleted :(
> Is there more to it than that?
Yes, there is. I can see how someone not already familiar with the material would feel lost.
First, it's based on SCP, as other people have mentioned. Second, it's very dialogue/monologue driven, there's lots of exposition about a shared universe, vaguely hinted at, secret government agencies, conspiracies, etc.
The author chose a very topic which by definition is hard to understand: ideas (or memes) that do NOT want to be remembered. So a lot of what happens is discussing "dangerous" ideas that do not want to be remembered or discussed. There's a larger overarching plot, split across several related stories.
The guy with the gun was one such idea embodied in the physical shape of a man. It was confusing the boss on purpose. Wheeler was on to him from the beginning (because her boss doesn't have an assistant), but needed to get her boss on board with the idea first, before shooting the "assistant". Everything she does in the dialogue has this goal.
I came back here for the comments after clicking through and my wifi was glitching, leading me to get a "can't find this site" message for a minute. Interesting experience.
Astrid! Or more accurately, Jasika Nicole.
Jasika will always be Astrid from Fringe. In my head, Helen Hunt plays wheeler.
You mean Astro?
No, Asterix.
Astral.
Did anybody else find the original story mediocre stuff? Interesting premise, but neither novel nor that deep. PKD has done 100x with much less.
I really liked it and all the little interesting ideas within it, like the antimimetic worms that live everywhere. I actually found it very creative and clever. However, I didn't think the recent rewrite was as much of an improvement as others seem to. The later parts were improved but I thought some of the padding out of earlier parts arguably came out worse.
---
Edit:
To give an actual example, Marion's description in the original, from the scene in the video:
She is turning fifty this year and slowly greying, well on her way out of "petite" towards "little old lady".
In the updated edition:
She turns fifty this year. She is diminutive and flint-eyed, very dark-haired but rapidly greying. Today, her hair is strictly pulled back and up into a silver clasp. She wore her good suit for this, one button, very dark grey, with a solid blue blouse underneath. Ankle boots with stout heels, two silver stud earrings in each lobe. Contact lenses, not the usual glasses. On a lanyard around her neck she wears a security pass with a bright orange and red diagonal stripe.
Two uses of 'very dark' right after each other? And I actually liked how snappy the original was but that might be just me.
Another line in this first chapter that I love from the original:
"What…" O5-8 asks carefully, "would happen if we did know?"
becomes in the new edition:
"What…" Mahlo asks carefully, "would happen if we did know what happened to him?"
Why pad that out? It sounds less natural now.
There were also some examples of sloppy editing in the updated edition, like multiple uses of the word "perimetre" which the author acknowledges was an 'incautious find-and-replace from the US English "meter" to UK English "metre"' https://qntm.org/antimemetics#komment6913d2eb6c240
Which is especially odd because the author (Sam Hughes) lives in the UK and wrote the original in UK English, but apparently wrote the rewrite in US English. For example, a chapter in the original was titled "Case Colourless Green", but in the US edition of the rewrite that chapter is "Case Colorless Green" (without the 'u'). So Hughes, a native UK English speaker, wrote the rewrite in a non-native (to him) dialect, then had it (lazily) translated into his native dialect.
It was probably to deal with the transposition [0] out of the SCP universe into a new one. SCP is vaguely 'set' in the US because that's how a majority of the contributors naturally write and spell things, which sets the voice of the world indirectly.
[0] AKA "filing the serial numbers off" when it's explicitly fanfiction instead of a shared universe model like SCP
I liked it for the interesting ideas within it. My favorite part of a story is the worldbuilding, the author's unique take on an idea, the special ways that different characters think and act. There's not a great deal of artistry I require in the introduction of a 49-year-old greying woman deep in some giant bureaucracy to imagine how other people relate to her, I'm interested more in the idea of a bureaucracy that deals with antimemes.
Perhaps that comes from reading too many online stories - including the whole of qntm's site [1], including the rough drafts. The quality of the editing, prose, or dialog isn't that important to me if the quality of the worldbuilding and the concepts are high enough.
I did find the introductory short story (this one) brilliant, as it's short, shows a clever and surprising inversion of roles midway, but especially because the premise- antimemetics- is actually extremely interesting. I even wonder if it has been developed seriously- I mean the study of antimemes as a communication/ propaganda technique.
It's true that the whole novel, despite a few good moments, seems mostly interested in plot and entertainment. Having read quite a bit of qntm's stuff online, I'd say he excels in the short story format where he can quickly present a clever or surprising idea and there isn't the need to sustain a plot or work on character development etc.
Anyway, comparing a random author to one of the best and most influential sci-fi authors ever is a bit pointless, don't you think?
> I even wonder if it has been developed seriously- I mean the study of antimemes as a communication/ propaganda technique.
Tell me you can't see the fnords without telling me...
I loved the ideas! The premise was novel to me, and I also don't think I've encountered the same idea since (except for in reference to the original story). I'm not a fan of the writing style though. It's very stiff and heavy-handed, as if the writer's only goal is to setup the next twist. But I can't complain that much, it reminds me a lot of my own writing.
My standard for website fiction is lower. When you're unknown, there's less pressure to go through a long editing cycle. Pale and SEEK have been good though.
Would not consider myself well-read, if I read enough PKD stories I could probably find some mediocre ones; really liked the popular ones I did read.
Indeed, it works fine as an introduction to a longer series, but on its own feels pretty unfulfilling.
I think the story where she detains her own husband would work much better in a stand-alone adaptation.
I thought the short movie was also mediocre. It should have been much shorter.
thought the idea quite fun, the execution incredibly amateurish.
The idea was entertaining and I enjoyed the read. The author is clearly accustomed to shorter works. The final book has the feel of an anthology. Regardless, one my top 1000.
This book was so good. Can't wait to watch this after work :)
Interesting that there are two versions that I know of!
I watched this one first, and I prefer it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-IiVeGAydE. I like the actress who plays Wheeler better (no disrespect to Jasika Nicole, she does a good job too and I loved her in Fringe), and the script seems to stick closer to the original short story form from the website. Is this new short based on the book? If so, it seems the dialogues in the book are... weaker maybe?
Things I liked in this short: the use of B&W, and I thought the actor who plays O5-8 is stronger in this version.
I wonder if this story could become a "standard" for indie directors to riff off?
IMHO The writing and acting are much better in this new one. The way the fake agent was revealed is far superior, and so was how the pills were introduced and handed over. The original is fine, but it has a lot of "and now for this!" moments that just don't flow into each other.
This new one spends time building trust between the two characters, the resolution feels earned and not just handed out for the sake of the plot moving forward.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I liked this one. I would definitely watch the rest of the stories with this cast and director!
Maybe it's just a case of having watched the other version first.
I just finished the book and it did not live up to all its hype. Quite boring, actually.
Or did you actually finished the book? Think very hard. You must want it.
What book?
Read this as "antiemetics" (anti-nausea meds like Zofran) and was very confused for a moment.
Fnord!
Was this authorised by QNTM?
Doesn't need to be, the default license for SCP Wiki is Creative Commons BY-SA so you only have to attribute the source and distribute under the same license. I don't see that mentioned so it might technically violate the license unless they negotiated directly with qntm under a different agreement. That's the tricky thing with licenses, you never know if they have so unless the original creator is raising a stink you can't know and legally you have no grounds to object even if they are violating the license.
I think all SCP content is creative commons share alike (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/), so I don't think he actually needs to -- assuming this is based on SCP and not the book. I know the book had some revisions done to make it legally distinct from the SCP stories for copyright purposes.
In one of the youtube comments the director says that they contacted the author and got permission.
Crafted by Rajat
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